Getting to the bottom of UNC's role in COVID | Hour 3

What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to the Pete calendar show.com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button, get every episode for free, right to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support. As we do on Mondays at 2 o'clock, we chat with A.P. Dillon. She is a reporter at the North State Journal. NSJOnline.com is that website. She is also the publisher of a Substack newsletter called More to the Story. Hello, A.P. How are you? I'm doing great, Pete. And how are you on this Monday? I am doing all right. Just a little angry. Just a wee bit angry. We had a toddler murdered in Charlotte over the weekend. And we've got a Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board in disarray. Just a lot of stuff. I know about the school board, but I didn't know about the topic. That's horrifying. Yeah. Murdered, shot and killed in apparently a hail of gunfire into four different homes in North Charlotte. I'm starting to think that one of our texters is correct, that these are gang initiations, because this has happened now several times. And I think this is now the second little kid that's been murdered in a similar circumstance. And just spray a bunch of homes. For that family. Yeah. All right, let me start with a piece that you've got at North State Journal. It's about the launch of a website and a petition that's related to it. CarolinaFlu.org. Carolina Flu. So is this a new virus sweeping the state here or what? This is a website that has a letter that can be used as a petition to ask Chancellor Lee Roberts to open a formal investigation, a full one, including reviewing all documents, releasing them to the public. On COVID and its origins, and including Ralph Baric's involvement in that. So, all right, so this is specifically about UNC Chapel Hill, correct? Correct. Right. Correct. Okay, and so this, it was established, you're right, by George Howard, a UNC Chapel Hill alum and former U.S. Senate staffer. as well as a fellow named James Haslam, who is and you identify him as an independent researcher and author of a self-published book called COVID-19 Mystery Solved. All right. So do they have like are they approaching this from a like, you know, we we know the truth kind of perspective, like we know what happened and this is to prove our theory. Well, they've got a lot of documentation on their website. They have a timeline. They've got the Defeese Project, which was an issue that was raised in a lot of the congressional hearings dealing with the origins of COVID and papers and activities that happened with the DARPA project that was initially initiated for this. So there's a lot of evidence-based material on their website, and they say that it's sort of like a pattern of You know, it's a hard pattern to miss that, you know, this was, you know, unavoidable. This was inevitable, actually, that this was going to happen. But they say there's a couple folks in there that haven't been asked to come before Congress, one of which was one of the researchers who went back and forth, a woman named Daniel Anderson, who they say is, quote, relevant as a possible witness and part of a testable hypothesis. But it's not someone that they think that has done any wrongdoing, but she was just involved in the going back and forth to cleaning up the lab project before COVID actually hit worldwide. So, like I said, there's a detailed timeline. There's an expanding evidence library on that website, which people can go and review and look at. And if they decide that they want to get on board with this, they can sign the letter, which is pretty prominent on their website. And so this is calling on the chancellor. Is that the system? I always get these confused. The system or the school? Just Chapel Hill. Just Chapel Hill. Okay. Because apparently this Danielle Anderson, she was a Duke scientist, right? She was sort of. She was Duke-NUS. I don't know what that stands for. With regular access to the Wuhan Institute of Virology's high containment labs. And the defused materials identify her with the Duke NUS work associated with the proposed field testing component. And she's never been publicly questioned under oath. Right. So, yeah. Howard says that he thinks that her testimony to explain what work was performed and what she saw, you know, and what she might have known before the outbreak could, you know, pretty much settle everything right so he's he's putting pressure on that so if. I remember correctly because i covered this a couple of months ago when i think this development came out or something weird because i remember this thing with darpa and the diffuse uh uh contract or whatever and they they like uh they were uh barrack was turned down like they they had submitted their work to do this same sort of stuff with the furin cleavage site and all of this. They had asked for money through DARPA, and DARPA was like, oh, no, we're not doing that. And then it's like they went ahead and did sort of like an end run around, right? They set up EcoHealth Alliance, if I remember correctly, and sort of like back-channeled a way around that. This the the the denial from DARPA if I remember. Yeah, I think they broke it in a different Different projects that look like they weren't related but they were and it would have ended up being their original proposal to look at immune interventions and back and They wanted something like 14 million over 14 million for that. That was a 28 the defeat proposal was done in 2018 and Right. Because, yeah, if I recall correctly, there were like this sort of research got shut down, I think, in Obama's administration because there were some high profile mistakes or accidents or releases from labs or something like. And so people started freaking out and they and so they shut down all of this kind of research. But Barrick and company, they wanted to keep doing it. And so they they tried to find different ways to keep doing it. And Fauci, too. Right. So if I remember correctly. Um, all right. So you can read about that at NSJ online.com. Um, and you can also check out the website, Carolina flu.org. Um, speaking of schools, uh, K-12 testing, uh, we got some results back. You broke this down also with the North state journal. Um, so a little bit of good news. It looks like we are now back to where we were prior to the pandemic. Um, getting closer, but not quite bad. So that, all right. So where are we at? Like 90% of kids at grade level, something like that? Um, no, no, not really. Um, the, the testing schema that's, that's been going on here. They, they, they changed some of the benchmarks in the recent years. They changed some of the testing on a couple of the tests. So, Things shifted just slightly. But what people should be looking for in these scores isn't necessarily, you know, graduation rates or that sort of thing. It's proficiency scores. And proficiency, excuse me, they rose to 59.2% across all subjects and grades. 59.2% across all subjects. So that tells me then that 40% of students are not proficient. Yes. That would be accurate. And that is up. There was a sharp drop in 2021, 2022, right after the pandemic. That proficiency score dropped to 51%. I wonder why that happened. Do we have any idea why that might have happened? Why kids got dumber or something? Or why they weren't as proficient during the pandemic? I don't know why remote instruction didn't work. Shocking. But they rose a little bit in the following years. They went up another point last year. So, I mean, they've been ticking up and ticking up and ticking up, but they're still not, you know, I mean, obviously, it should be higher than that. You know, we should be seeing, you know, more than a quarter of them at least proficient, but that's never been something that's happened in the state. And this is across all subjects you point out. So, like, if you want to go deeper into, like, math or reading or, you know, I don't know what other subject, history or something, like, all of these different subjects are going to have different proficiencies? Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, like math proficiency for three to eight grades, three to eight. When you look at those scores, it was 59.6, which, um, did go past the pre pandemic rate at every grade level, except seventh grade. So that one did, that one did pump up. Um, the, the seventh grade math was two points off the 2018, 2019 level of 56.1. So that, that kind of went up reading for grades, um, went up, um, they went up about three, a little over three points from last year. but they're still short of the 57% pre-pandemic proficiency level. So that was an issue there. Third grade reading, it fell in 2024 to 46.6%, but it rose this year to 55.3. It was a big jump. Oh, that is a big jump. Yeah. And, you know, I got to say that I think that you're going to see the lower grade scores drop As they progress, I think you're going to see those scores improve because of what the former superintendent, Catherine Truitt, put in place with the letters reading. And uh, it's basically a phonics based reading program. And she implemented that. Oh God. And I think in her first year and a half, she started pushing that through and all the teachers got trained and, um, they've been seeing very good, um, results from that. And I've reported on that over the years. That program seems to be having a real impact. It's sort of the North Carolina version of the so-called Mississippi miracle. It's the same sort of approach, uh, You know, to, hey, why don't we go back and, you know, teach kids the ways that worked and do it that way versus the whole language, whatever stupidity that was that we were doing for about 10 to 15 years where kids were not actually learning how to read. So so that's good news. OK, so and that's a North State Journal as well. Over on your Substack newsletter called More to the Story, one of my favorite topics, ActBlue. You've got a write-up here detailing the congressional report. You've got three different House Republican committees that have been investigating ActBlue. This is the big fundraising platform for basically every Democrat candidate. running for office at almost every single level in America. And there are some questions about their security efforts on their website. It almost seems like they didn't care if you were an American citizen making donations to public campaigns. They just wanted the money. Yeah, they found that basically the way they were checking to make sure it wasn't for money was. Quote, weak. Weak. And that was being mild. They have a passport check, which they characterize as mostly a character count. So if a donor put in a non-US address, ActBlue popped up a passport field number, and the internal policy for ActBlue said the system only checked that the entry had the right number of characters. Didn't confirm if it was real or not. So you could just type in 00000, whatever, for your passport number, and that would suffice. Staff were also told to accept donations that already looked fake or foreign. They looked at logs between 2022 and 2024 that showed supervisors repeatedly giving a rule that said give donors the benefit of the doubt. An example from that was a donor with an IP and billing mismatch, a foreign credit card, a strange email, and links to other rejected users. but the donation was still accepted because staff can't say for sure this is fraud. Right. I mean, you got four criteria there that would indicate it's fraud, but we just don't know. So, but honestly, I mean, from a political party that doesn't want to prosecute any crime, really like this is on brand for them. Like, Oh yeah. Yeah. And this was a big deal, you know, in the, in the report that you've had the case of a pattern with small prepaid credit cards or gift cards to the Harris campaign. Um, That employee said was, quote, good to accept, which turned out later to be, you know, not so good to accept. Lawyers, another one, the other point, big point in the report was that lawyers inside and outside the company flagged possible knowing violations and false statements to Congress. Whoops. Yeah, well, and that was when they were making statements because then they started just taking the fifth. Everybody that was called before these bodies started just pleading the fifth so they wouldn't incriminate themselves. Yeah, their CEO and about 20-some-odd other individuals that worked for the company, whether they were board members, staffers, or actual elected officers of the of the company, they all took the fifth in recent closed-door hearings. And a lot of them had quit. A lot of them had resigned after the alleged false statements were made. They started just jumping ship from ActBlue. I got to wonder what's going to happen. Is there another fundraising platform that they're going to be able to swap in? Because almost every Democrat running for office uses ActBlue now. I do NGOs and things like that that are tied to them and nonprofits. But, you know, that post is right now it's for subscribers only, but it will be unlocked in a couple of days. So folks can go and read that one. And at the very bottom, there is a link to the release transcripts. Late last week, those three committees jointly released some of the transcript of those officials. So if they want to read those and see the fifth a bunch of times, they can probably do that. That's right. All right, A.P. Dillon, you can read her stuff at Substack. More to the story is the newsletter, also NSJOnline.com. Thanks, A.P. We'll talk with you next week. Thanks, Pete. All right, take care. That's A.P. Dillon. All right, for over a year now, you've heard me talking about Create-A-Video, great local company in Mint Hill that has helped more than 2 million families preserve their memories by turning old photos, VHS tapes, film reels, and slides into lasting keepsakes. Now, Create-A-Video is helping families and groups create brand new memories while they're traveling. 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Check out GroupTravelVideos.com. That's GroupTravelVideos.com. Or call 704-846-7870, extension 206. And when you do that, ask for Katie. But Pete, can I just email? Well, yes, you can. You can email Katie, Katie at GroupTravelVideos.com. Group Travel Videos, from old memories to new adventures, preserving life's moments for a lifetime. All right, so the House Judiciary Committee, the House Administration Committee, and the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, all released. They're all working together on this investigation into act blue, the democratic fundraising platform. Okay. This is from Amy Curtis at townhall.com who says the, uh, committees found act blue failed to prevent illegal foreign political contributions. I know who would have guessed two years ago, the committees began investigating their fraud prevention practices in 2024 and ActBlue changed its fraud policy twice during the presidential campaign, reportedly implementing more lenient standards that then allowed foreign donations and other suspicious donor money to flow into U.S. campaigns. I know, shocking. By the way, this is not new. The very same thing was identified in Obama for America's fundraising platform. When Obama was running in 08, the same problems were identified. And then after he won, the FEC cleared him, cleared his fundraisers of any illegal activity. Even though like there was, all they had to do was click a button, literally click a box, just check the box to turn on the restriction against foreign donations. But they didn't do it. Earlier this year, the New York Times reported that ActBlue's lawyers warned that its chief executive had given potentially misleading responses to Republican investigators. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit against the organization over its allowing foreign donations and lying about its donation practices. When called to testify before Congress, several staffers pleaded the fifth, and more recent reporting showed that an elderly Michigan woman made 15,000 donations, totaling more than $ 150, 000 to various candidates, including Abdul El-Sayed through ActBlue. That woman, who lives in a trailer on a fixed income, says she never made those donations. this is what's called, I believe smurfing. So you just need the person's account. It's not her money. She's not being defrauded, right? They're not draining her bank accounts. They're using her account to take money from somewhere else from somebody or an organization that has already maybe, you know, made the maximum donations. So they're not allowed to donate anymore or they're coming from outside the country or, They're coming from some prohibited donor, whatever. And you need to launder the money through these small accounts. And so they rack up 15,000 donations. And then you get to say, oh, look, we have all of these small dollar donations. We're really for the people and of the people. Look at us. This has been going on for years with ActBlue. Alrighty, so tonight, the Charlotte City Council will be voting on whether to flip-flop-flip. Flop-flip-flop. Flip-flop-flop-flip. Well, to go back to their original position that they flip-flopped off of. So I guess it is a flip-flop-flip. Right? It's a triple Lindy, if you will. This from the Charlotte Observer, Nick Sullivan, the reporter. Charlotte stunned the state in May when the city council veered from that night's planned agenda and voted to pull support from the controversial I-77 South toll lanes project. Other towns followed. The project that took years to plan was quite suddenly canceled. did. The vote was a moment of triumph for community organizers, a.k.a. leftists, as well as residents, particularly those whose neighborhoods border the interstate and were vulnerable to demolition. Now Charlotte is primed to walk it all back. No! The council tonight So this should be fun. You know what I'm going to be doing tonight? I will be watching this Charlotte City Council meeting so you don't have to. They're going to hold a public hearing where people will say a bunch of stuff within the allotted two minutes. Then they're going to have a vote. That vote will decide whether to revive the project amid financial pressure from state lawmakers. The General Assembly included a provision in this year's budget that would penalize any local government that voted against the toll lanes. Okay, so the penalty is a clawback. Okay, so it's not strictly a penalty. It is a clawback for the money that has already been spent because at every step along the way, every local government, representative on the regional transportation planning body, they all voted to keep proceeding. And so NCDOT kept spending money. They kept planning. They kept doing the engineering work, right? They have been walking down this path for the better part of a decade, I believe, maybe even longer. So it's been a while. Okay. So they've been doing all of the work, spending all of the money, bring up all the plans. And then all of a sudden the city of Charlotte and representatives from other towns, they all flipped their votes and said, no, we don't like this idea. We don't like this plan, which like everybody agrees that I-77 from uptown Charlotte down to the South Carolina border, it's an 11 mile stretch. It's like the most congested stretch of interstate in the state. Everybody agrees that it has to be widened. The problem is, if you try to widen it out, add lanes on either side of the interstate, you're going to have to start buying up a whole bunch of properties, right? Because you got development that's right up against the interstate. Once again, the original sin here was... building the interstate right through the city as we did. And this happened all over America. It's not a good, it was just not a good idea. But this is what everybody was doing, you know, what, 70, 80 years ago, whenever it was. And everybody thought, well, we'll just keep adding more and more lanes and we'll never need more than two lanes for the interstate or whatever. And, you know, now we do. So, okay, if you can't go out because it's going to be so cost prohibitive, You can't add lanes on the left side, on the right side in each direction. So then they, then they were like, okay, well, we'll, we'll go up. We'll put a double decker on this thing. And, but that's still going to require them taking some property along the path of the road. And some of those properties are in McCrory Heights, I believe is the, the neighborhood. And I think there's like 20 homes or so that are sort of in the, in the pathway. So they would have to be bought out and demolished. And that has, that's what prompted the outrage because McCrory Heights is a historically black neighborhood. And so you had people playing the race card saying that, Oh, they're trying to destroy a black neighborhood when no, they're trying to widen the interstate. That's yeah. And then there were some other properties along Wilmore neighborhood as well, which has pretty much gentrified at this point. So you don't really hear that argument at a Wilmore there. It's more about a park that's near the interstate that the park would get, would get taken up. All right. So there was a meeting last week. I believe this was a transportation committee meeting, I think, but there was a meeting last week. And at this meeting, there was an indication that two key members of Charlotte city council are ready to to flip. I don't know who they are though. Um, not really sure. I don't, I don't know if there's maybe, it may be Malcolm Graham. I don't know. Not really sure. Um, he may be one of them. Um, However, these two members say they had not yet made up their minds the move would single-handedly bring the same project they killed four months earlier back from the grave. The council's historic vote could decide whether the state moves forward with the expensive transportation project, the most expensive project in North Carolina history. And once again, the state does not have the funds to build this project. It comes in at like $ 3. 5 billion. And it would be, I suspect, even more expensive if they were to try to buy up all the land on the sides of the interstate. Now, as far as I know, they have not explored tunneling underneath, which people have raised this as a potential option. Why not go underneath? I've seen no indication, no reporting that that was ever contemplated. So I don't know what the price of that would be. Transportation planners... began discussing the possibility of express toll lanes back in 2007. Okay, so 20 years ago, they started talking about express toll lanes. After several stages of studies and approvals, the Charlotte Regional Transportation Planning Organization, or the CRTPO, or as I call it, the CRTPO, they voted two years ago, 2024, The Curtipo voted to approve a funding agreement for the toll lanes. Okay, so people who are opposed to this project because they are opposed to the toll lanes, that isn't even really, that's not a reason why the Curtipo is blocking this now. Okay, so the toll lane argument, I hear a lot of people on the text line and callers and stuff, and they complain about the toll lane concept. That's not really what Curtipo is focused on. They were fine with it two years ago. It's about the impact on the one neighborhood. That's what it seems like this is all about. And now the state says, well, we've already shelled out like between 60 to 70 million dollars on planning and engineering and design work over the last 20 years. So we need that money back. If you're not if you're going to block this, we need the money back. And now you've got the locals saying that's not fair. That's against the law. We shouldn't have to pay it back. But I'm unclear, like, what other plan could there be but for this one? I don't know. I've not heard any other options. Again, from the Charlotte Observer. And by the way, this piece by Nick Sullivan at the Observer did a good job. I thought he did a good job covering this. all the different sides to it and the different positions. He writes the goal of the $ 3. 2 billion project was to reduce traffic and crashes along an 11 mile stretch of I-77 South from the Brookshire freeway exit to the South Carolina border. The corridor had a crash rate more than two and a half times higher than than the statewide average for urban interstates, a statistic that the North Carolina DOT attributes to ever-increasing congestion. NCDOT, according to the funding framework that they had set up, NCDOT would spend $ 600 million on the project and then an additional $ 100 million on transportation projects of Charlotte's choosing. So that was sort of the sweetener. There's $ 100 million that you can do. You control that. funding. But a year after the Curtipo approved it, NCDOT released the first maps of the project's proposed design showing that it would cut directly through historically black neighborhoods. That set off a frenzy among people in those neighborhoods and community organizers who don't want houses torn down. They were joined by residents who, neighborhood impacts aside, did not want another set of toll lanes because the express lanes running up I-77 North have not solved the congestion problem up there. Elected officials have since fielded an unrelenting pressure campaign from every direction. Business leaders pushed for council members to stay the course, and after the council flipped, business leaders have been pressuring them to undo their action. Cassidy on the text line calls it the flip-floppery. Yes, flip-floppery. The NCDOT tried to ease tensions by establishing a community engagement center so people can feel heard. I just, I feel heard. And, they delayed the project by one month so they could collect more feedback. Okay. Well, what are you going to do with the feedback? I've said this from the beginning when they first unveiled the plans and all the outrage ensued, I was asking like, well, maybe you should move the release of the maps to sort of earlier in the process, right? Maybe you should give some options, do some, Community meetings and that sort of thing, like maybe more community engagement on the front end. And look, NCDOT does do this. You can go to their website and you can pull up all the projects that are under design. You can look at the timelines and the plans and all of that. Spoiler alert, the vast majority of people do not do that, okay? Most people do not pay any attention to any local or state government issues until somebody wants to put an interstate through your front yard. I get it, okay? I get it. I'm not one of those people. This might surprise you. I am not one of those people. I actually pull up the area plans. I look at the rezonings in my neighborhood. Like, I do this sort of stuff. I pull up crime stats before I move to a particular area. I do that research ahead of time. But I recognize most people do not, okay? So maybe you need to reorganize the planning process so you come forward with the plans earlier in the process so you don't get this far down the road again. No pun intended. The department also committed to rebuilding at least 17 of 22 bridges and overpasses over I-77 Southern footprint and adding pedestrian and cycle access to them, which is something that I think the city officials want to see, right? Rebuilding of all the bridges. Isn't that a good idea? You're adding bicycle lanes, and I thought everybody wanted the bicycle lanes. No? And the black political caucus weighed in. They demanded pledges from its members on city council to support voting no on the toll lanes. So they're pressuring their people on council. The BPC is considered one of Charlotte's most influential groups in local politics. About half of the democratic primary voters in Charlotte are black and And the BPC's endorsements usually go on to win. And there again is the tie-in to the topics of the first two hours. Right? This is the whole friend-enemy distinction. No enemies on my side of it. Snitches get stitches. All of it's the same thing. Like, you guys are not deciding these things based on, dare I say it, to channel my inner Roy Cut-Em-Loose Cooper, the science and data... You got to look at the data here because now the city is going to either have to pay back the money or flip flop on the vote tonight. So I know what I'm going to be doing tonight. I will be watching. So you don't have to. All right. That'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast. So if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to the Pete calendar show.com again, Thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.